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Acquisitions, Developmental, and Project Editor: Devon Musgrave Cover: Twist Creative • Seattle and Joel Panchot 1 Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 21 Who This Book Is For ........................................................................................................ 23 What You'll Need (Can You Say “Samples”?) ...................................................................... 24 A Formatting Note............................................................................................................ 25 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 26 Free Ebooks from Microsoft Press ..................................................................................... 28 The “Microsoft Press Guided Tours” App ........................................................................... 28 Errata & Book Support ...................................................................................................... 28 We Want to Hear from You............................................................................................... 29 Stay in Touch ................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 1 The Life Story of a Windows Store App: Characteristics of the Windows Platform .............................................................................................................. 30 Leaving Home: Onboarding to the Windows Store ............................................................. 32 Discovery, Acquisition, and Installation.............................................................................. 35 Playing in Your Own Room: The App Container .................................................................. 39 Different Views of Life: Views and Resolution Scaling ......................................................... 42 Those Capabilities Again: Getting to Data and Devices ........................................................ 46 Taking a Break, Getting Some Rest: Process Lifecycle Management..................................... 49 Remembering Yourself: App State and Roaming................................................................. 51 Coming Back Home: Updates and New Opportunities ........................................................ 56 And, Oh Yes, Then There’s Design ..................................................................................... 58 Feature Roadmap and Cross-Reference ............................................................................. 59 Chapter 2 Quickstart .......................................................................................................... 65 A Really Quick Quickstart: The Blank App Template ............................................................ 65 Blank App Project Structure .......................................................................................... 68 2 QuickStart #1: Here My Am! and an Introduction to Blend for Visual Studio ........................ 72 Design Wireframes ....................................................................................................... 73 Create the Markup ....................................................................................................... 76 Styling in Blend............................................................................................................. 78 Adding the Code........................................................................................................... 83 Extra Credit: Improving the App ........................................................................................ 97 Receiving Messages from the iframe ............................................................................. 98 Improving the Placeholder Image with a Canvas Element................................................ 99 Handling Variable Image Sizes ..................................................................................... 100 Moving the Captured Image to AppData (or the Pictures Library) .................................. 103 Using a Thumbnail Instead of the Full Image ................................................................ 105 The Other Templates: Projects and Items ........................................................................ 107 Navigation App Template............................................................................................ 107 Grid App Template ..................................................................................................... 107 Hub App Template...................................................................................................... 108 Split Template ............................................................................................................ 108 Item Templates .......................................................................................................... 108 What We’ve Just Learned ............................................................................................... 109 Chapter 3 App Anatomy and Performance Fundamentals .................................................. 111 App Activation ............................................................................................................... 112 Branding Your App 101: The Splash Screen and Other Visuals ....................................... 113 Activation Event Sequence .......................................................................................... 117 Activation Code Paths ................................................................................................. 119 WinJS.Application Events ............................................................................................ 121 Optimizing Startup Time ............................................................................................. 124 WinRT Events and removeEventListener.......................................................................... 126 App Lifecycle Transition Events and Session State ............................................................ 128 Suspend, Resume, and Terminate................................................................................ 129 3 Basic Session State in Here My Am! ............................................................................. 133 Page Controls and Navigation ......................................................................................... 136 WinJS Tools for Pages and Page Navigation .................................................................. 136 The Navigation App Template, PageControl Structure, and PageControlNavigator ......... 139 The Navigation Process and Navigation Styles .............................................................. 146 Optimizing Page Switching: Show-and-Hide ................................................................. 148 Page-Specific Styling ................................................................................................... 149 Async Operations: Be True to Your Promises .................................................................... 151 Using Promises ........................................................................................................... 151 Joining Parallel Promises ............................................................................................. 153 Sequential Promises: Nesting and Chaining .................................................................